ANALYSIS: New voice gains strength against Albany

ALBANY -- Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner last month sat alone before the state Legislature's most powerful leaders at a budget hearing without the usual entourage of political advisers and numbers crunchers. It was no sweat.

She was already embroiled in a rare public dispute with powerful Gov. Andrew Cuomo over one of his proposals for local governments, daring to call it risky and "an accounting gimmick." For a Cuomo, "gimmick" is a lightning rod that goes back to the days when his father, former Gov. Mario Cuomo, "sold" Attica state prison to another state entity to raise cash for the budget.

In New York Times commentary on Thursday, Miner used the word "gimmick" three times and called on Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli and the Legislature to reject Cuomo's budget until more and better fiscal options are offered to cities and counties outside New York City. Those smaller municipalities are slipping closer to insolvency as taxpayers reach their limits, cuts are made to police, fire and other services, and costs soar.

The response was swift.

Advertisement

Cuomo's director of operations, Howard Glaser, took to an Albany radio station Thursday morning and said Miner was just begging for state money to solve problems her city created, though she hasn't asked for a bailout from a broke Albany. Then Glaser issued not-so-friendly advice.

"If you're unwilling or unable to solve a problem in fiscal management in a city," Glaser told WGDJ-AM, "you ask the Legislature to create a financial control board, and the financial control board will solve the problem for you."

Under a control board, Cuomo's appointees would take over her city and use extraordinary powers to overhaul its fiscal structure, including labor contracts.

The reaction from Miner, whom Cuomo appointed as co-chairwoman of the state Democratic Party, was rare in Albany.

"Of course it was difficult," Miner, 52, told The Associated Press about her challenge to Cuomo. "But the most profound job I have is to represent the people of the city of Syracuse ... I don't want Syracuse to become Detroit."

Elected in 2009, Miner has called on Cuomo and the Legislature to hold a summit to find more options like loosening laws adopted in Albany over decades that favor politically powerful public worker unions. Cuomo, who has held summits to advance Greek yogurt and beer and wine sales, isn't budging. He is trying to get local government officials together this summer but only to field teams in an exhibition for a white water rafting tourism event.

"If we had more tools, then we could solve it," said Miner, who recently announced she would run for a second term. "But these problems were created to a large part because of state regulations."

E.J. McMahon of the conservative Manhattan Institute said this is a critical time for cities to act and an opportune moment for Cuomo to take bold action. The state's binding arbitration law is expiring, which gives a governor extraordinary power to change a measure that the Legislature desperately wants extended.

Cuomo is proposing a break for cities by forcing arbitrators in labor disputes to consider for the first time the ability of taxpayers to afford large payouts or benefits. That would be a major change and would join Cuomo's past measures that also help local government finances, including the state takeover of increases in Medicaid costs.

McMahon says Cuomo can do much more, such as ending work rules that allow police and other public workers to earn overtime pay that could be avoided.

Cuomo, however, as chief executive and perhaps as a potential 2016 presidential candidate, must strike a balance. The union revolt in 2011 in another strong union state, Wisconsin, forced an unsuccessful recall vote of that state's governor.

"The unions react like you shot their dog no matter what you do," McMahon countered. Cuomo's "budget seems to reflect a continuing desire to appear bold, but I think that in contrast to especially his first year, the reality is that a lot of it is cautious and incremental."

Miner insists the fight isn't personal or political.

"It's not just my job, but these are my friends, these are my family, these are my neighbors," she said. "When you can't sleep at night because you are worried about being able to provide services that are fundamental to the quality of life and you say to yourself, 'Somebody has got to do something,' and then you remember you are the mayor and you are that somebody, that's pretty much how it plays out."